The global launch of Sony's online store, PlayStation.com, in Japan in March saw 600,000 hits against the Web site in the first two minutes of operation. In the first week a total of 980,000 orders were placed, approximately one third of them via the Web.
With such a Web savvy dedicated following, huge demand was also anticipated for the 20 November launch in Australia. Prime contractors SAP and PricewaterhouseCoopers consequently engaged Mercury Interactive to undertake hosted load testing from a remote location to minimise downtime and ensure PlayStation.com could manage continual Web site traffic.
"If the site were to go down, it could lead to a loss of sales, so we had to make sure that we could handle what we estimated would be the exposure," explains Mercury's regional sales manager, Simon McCrostie.
According to McCrostie, Mercury Interactive's ActiveTest service uses "load farms" in which it provides the hardware and the experts to write test scripts and run load tests on behalf of a client. Not having a load farm in Australia, though, Mercury worked with CTP, who built one on Mercury's behalf. ActiveTest stress tests a Web site infrastructure through the Internet by running thousands of emulated users against the site to simulate real life conditions, pinpoint capacity limitation and identify bottlenecks
However, the biggest challenge in load testing, McCrostie says, is understanding the client's requirements.
"Many people believe load testing is simple and often don't realise what's required," he says. "A lot of planning has to go into it and in the case of PlayStation.com, we conducted a number of tests. There were also a lot of partners involved in the project and pulling all the areas together was quite complex. However, it was a great site to test, the outcome was good and the client's very happy."
